2. A second thought is that your startup hard drive is on it's way to "kicking the bucket". You may be able to get it to boot ok for a while...but eventually it will die completely (if this is the problem).

2. A second thought is that your startup hard drive is on it's way to "kicking the bucket". You may be able to get it to boot ok for a while...but eventually it will die completely (if this is the problem).

- Nick

can't be ether of those since, after troubleshooting for a while i noticed its because i'm running the harddrives from a IDE-PCI card to have the computer accept the 500 giger, if i plug the HDD straight to the motherboard, it boots just fine.

drivers, maybe?

pigoo3

01-04-2011 09:12 PM

If the hard drives aren't "dying"...and there's no issues with the 500gig drive...what's causing the "flashing question mark" is too long of a delay during the boot-up process.

The computer is "confused" looking for the appropriate "boot drive"...causing the flashing question mark. Then when it finally "finds or figures out" what the correct drive is...it can boot properly. It probably has to do with the "master/slave" hard drive relationship when you have two internal hard drives installed.